You’re free to set up your development environment any way you like. Here is a
way using the virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper tools. If you don’t
have them, you can install these both of these packages via:

$ pip install virtualenvwrapper

Virtual environments allow you to work on Python projects which are isolated
from one another so you can use different packages (and package versions) with
different projects.

Try to respect what is described in the PEP8 specification when providing patches. This can be
eased via the pep8 or flake8 tools, the latter of which in
particular will give you some useful hints about ways in which the
code/formatting can be improved.